The enemy within

It is early summer of 2009, an uneasy time in the American capital. Washington is tense over a showdown between the United States and the new ruler of Libya.

Laura Chapman is a U.S. Secret Service agent assigned to the White House. She is quirky, solitary, and frequently unorthodox. She is sexy and fit, adept with a pistol as well as with a hundred-pound Everlast bag. But she is also a brilliant intelligence analyst. That’s why she has been assigned to the Presidential Protection Detail for the past eleven years.

The CIA assigns Laura to a case that borders on the unthinkable: an assassination plot against the new president. Shockingly, the trigger man will be a member of the United States Secret Service.

Since the CIA knows that the assassin is male, Laura is not a suspect. The odds are heavily against her locating an alleged assassin within the Service, and even more heavily against her surviving the assignment.

Beyond that, problems abound: First, because of her age and gender, members of the Service as well as agents in the CIA and FBI are waiting for her to fail. Second, Laura’s personal life is in disarray, and her secret drinking is about to get out of hand. Third, the hit is scheduled to take place on July 4, 2009, in the Oval Office. Less than two weeks from now. As her investigation proceeds, Laura cannot shake the suspicion that there are things she has not been told, that she is being set up. . . . In her increasingly frequent moments of paranoia, she wonders: «Am I going to be the new Lee Harvey Oswald?».